Virginia Woolf
Biography Virginia Woolf (b. 1882) received her early education via her parents. As a young woman, she lost her mom and her sister, which caused her to suffer a series of nervous breakdowns. She continued to suffer from depressive periods and nervous breakdowns for the remainder of her life, before eventually taking her own life due to her continual suffering. Historical Influence "Working at the intersection of modernism and feminism, both of which she stood for, Woolf analyzed the differences between women as ''objects'' of representation and women as ''authors'' of representation, and invited her audience to think about 'the books that are not there.' In the process, she opened up the territory of modern feminist criticism" (pg. 892). "Woolf has also been seen as a representative of the sexual sea change that came after, and out of, the Victorian era. She grew up, like many others, in a world of exaggerated gender roles, secret transgressions, and repressive silence about sexual matters (she was apparently abused in her childhood by her two stepbrothers)" (pg. 894). Contemporary Influence A Room of One's Own Summary This essay is based on a series of lectures that Virginia Woolf delivered at Cambridge University in 1928. Her arguments are considered some of the pioneering work of feminism. Analysis "Shakespeare's Sister" In this portion of her essay, Woolf discusses the fate any woman with literary talent would have faced in the 16th century. She points out that talent is not enough to ensure success; the individual must also receive an education and financial and moral support from her family and community. During the 16th century, when a woman was expected to lead a domestic life and was educated only in ways that were necessary for that role, it would have been impossible for a woman to find success or fulfillment in any other societal role. After trying to make something of her natural talent, a 16th century woman would have been rejected, exiled, or possibly killed by her community. This is Woolf's theory as to why we see virtually nothing written by women until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The author also suggests that when women's writing did make it into the public sphere, it was authored anonymously. Essentially, Woolf's thought experiment regarding Shakespeare's sister demonstrates how it would have been impossible for a woman with literary talent and imagination to have a career or live a fulfilling life the way a man of equal talent could. Woolf links the talent of writing with mental illness, a connection which could be related to her personal struggle with mental illness. She suggests that "when...one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils...we are on the track of a lost novelist [or] a suppressed poet...who mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to" (898). Through this statement, Woolf claims that unexpressed or unaccepted talent will inevitably force an individual to lose his or her "health and sanity to a certainty" (898). However, this type of reaction may not be as universal as Woolf imagines. Because Woolf struggled with mental illness her whole life, it is not difficult to infer that, in this piece, Woolf is imagining herself and the reactions she would have displayed had she been born in the 16th century's restrictive environment. It is difficult to imagine that every talented woman found no place for her expression or was driven to insanity by her limited place in society. Such a universal claim cannot be the case. Instead, there certainly were ways for women to contribute creatively to their societies without being shunned. They could tell stories to their children and perhaps sing songs at community celebrations and gatherings. Unfortunately, as Woolf notes, little of this has been written down or recorded. Still, it seems extreme to claim that nearly all talented women were exiled or went insane because of their unused gifts. Sixteenth century women must have been far more resourceful and creative than to simply allow their gifts to be entirely stifled. They must have found outlets for their thoughts and creativity, although, unfortunately, those outlets were not preservable. "Chloe Liked Olivia" "Androgyny" Key Quotes "Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes" (pg 898). "For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty" (pg. 898). "'Chloe liked Olivia...' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women" (pg 898-899). "And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends...But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men" (pg. 899). "Now all that, of course, has had to be left out, and thus the splendid portrait of the fictitious woman is much too simple and much too monotonous. Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!" (pg. 899-900). "And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man.The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her" (pg. 901). "The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, on retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively" (pg. 901). "Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is if the woman's movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth" (pg. 902). "...that some of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible" (pg. 903). "Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father" (pg. 904). "However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, rests no more upon one sex than upon the other" (pg. 904). "Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal in no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death" (pg.904). Key Words * Fatal - something leading to death, failure, destruction, etc. Woolf brings up (not explicitly, but it's definitely a thread throughout the piece) the word "fatal" four times in the beginning sentences of the last paragraph (904). It's in regards to how we as a society regard sex, sexuality, gender, and beyond by boxing someone in and forcing works to define itself as such. Feminist Theory Major Works Jacob's Room (1922) Mrs. Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928) The Waves (1931) Between the Acts (1941) Related Works References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf Simon, Peter, editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.